Hyperledger Releases Sawtooth 1.0

Hyperledger is a collaborative cross-industry effort to advance blockchain technology that is hosted by The Linux Foundation. Today, January 30, 2018, sees the release of Sawtooth 1.0, the second active Hyperledger project to reach 1.0, following Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 in July 2017.

Sawtooth is a modular platform for building, deploying and running distributed ledgers using a new consensus algorithm, Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET), which targets large distributed validator populations with minimal resource consumption. Sawtooth was originally contributed by Intel and saw its graduation from “Incubation” to “Active” status in May 2017.

"We’re beyond excited to see not one but two of Hyperledger’s active projects hit 1.0,” said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger. "This is a huge testament to the strong collaboration of our growing community - I look forward to seeing even more products and services being powered by Hyperledger Sawtooth later this year.”

Sawtooth 1.0 introduces a number of new enterprise features:

On-chain governance – Utilizing smart contracts to vote on blockchain configuration settings such as the allowed participants and smart contracts.

Support for Ethereum – Running Solidity smart contracts and integrating with Ethereum tooling.

Dynamic consensus – Upgrading or swapping the blockchain consensus protocol on the fly as networks grow, enabling the integration of more scalable algorithms as they are available.

The new design enables parallel execution of code for better performance. It also enforces complete separation between the core blockchain and the apps, such that apps can be written in just about any language. This enabled the Sawtooth team to integrate the Hyperledger Burrow EVM as an application they call Seth, a combination of Sawtooth and Ethereum.

Some companies working on or with Sawtooth include Active Ticketing PLC, Amazon Web Services (AWS), dotBlockchain Media, Cisco, Huawei, Monax, The Open Music Initiative, PokitDok, Primechain Technologies, State Bank of India, T-Mobile, Wind River and Filament.

“Our customers are looking to build scalable blockchain solutions for use cases across multiple industries,” said Matt Yanchyshyn, director of Solutions Architecture, Amazon Web Services. “Providing Sawtooth as a turn-key product running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows our customers to deploy their own blockchains in a matter of minutes, while reducing the time it takes to run blockchain-based solutions on AWS.”